1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus such as a printer, a copying machine, a facsimile transmitter/receiver, and a complex machine having functions of those. More particularly, it relates to an image forming apparatus having a display screen for displaying information for a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a conventional technology related to this kind of image forming apparatus, there has been a display control device composed of a plurality of components. In this conventional technology, a plurality of display data for respective kinds of components is stored in a plurality of storage areas of a storage device. Further, one kind of combination information of components is stored in advance in the storage device.
According to the above-described conventional technology, in a case where more than ten kinds of components such as a sheet-supplying device, a print control device, a sheet-discharging device, and the like constitute one printer, display data are stored for respective kinds of components, and the display data can be desirably combined and displayed in accordance with combination information of an actual device configuration of the printer. Therefore, in the conventional technology, it would not be necessary to store all of display data for the respective kinds of device configurations of the printer, so that the capacity of the storage device can be suppressed.
However, in a case like the conventional technology where display data for respective kinds of components such as a sheet-supplying device, a print control device, and a sheet-discharging device like are stored, it would be necessary to reconstruct the display data at each time when an overall configuration (combination) of the apparatus changes. Therefore, this causes a problem that load on data processing becomes greater.
Further, in the case of the conventional technology, it would be necessary to perform complicated processing of collecting display data fragmented and stored for respective kinds, constructing (mapping) one display data from these collected display data, and transferring the constructed display data every time and outputting the same on a screen until the display data is actually displayed on the screen. Therefore, the method according the conventional technology is not efficient on a processing speed.
Further, each of the display data used in the conventional technology needs to be constructed exclusively for a respective unit of component of a kind such as a sheet-supplying device, a print control device, and a sheet-discharging device. Furthermore, since the display data have different sizes one another according to their kinds, a storage area must be reserved in accordance with a size of display data and allocated individually when all of these display data are stored in the storage device. Therefore, in the conventional technology, there is a problem that operations of constructing, maintaining, and managing the display data become complicated.